It’s a good question: are your leaders relationship builders? While the question would have been valuable in 1984, it feels more relevant in 2024 – when the organizational and follower expectations of leaders have changed with the economic and societal times. Research shows that people want a boss they know, like and trust – which means they want a relationship with that person.
We talk about the importance of leaders being relationship builders in blogs like this one, in books like those I write, and in workshops around the world. But we don’t always give leaders tangible ways to think about what to do and how to assess their progress as a relationship builder.
This short article is a call to do that in real life, and a step in that direction.
How Do We Build Relationships?
While we have all been relationship builders our entire lives, as a skill we don’t often think about it specifically. We know some seem to be better at it, but we don’t always unpack the reasons why, or just assume those are the “people people.”
Here is a simple framework that we discussed in greater length in our book, The Long-Distance Teammate.
Relationship strength is viewed as a combination of level of connectedness, and quality and frequency of interaction. When you feel connected with someone for reasons of experience, history, interests, or other factors, the relationship will be built and/or maintained. And the more frequently you interact in positive ways with people, the stronger the relationship will be.
This simple framework of connectedness and interaction gives you a simple but clear path both to judge the quality of your relationships and to find steps you can take to improve them.
Seven Questions to Ask
Here are seven questions an individual leader can ask to help them assess the strengths of their relationships with their teammates. To be clear – this is a one-way assessment and is based on our own self-awareness. That makes it an imperfect tool, but a useful tool and starting point, nonetheless.
- How well do I know the basic timeline of my team members’ life stories?
- Do I know the names of the key family members of my team members?
- To what level do I have shared interests or commonalities with my team members?
- How often do I ask about, or bring topics to the conversation that I know are interests of the other person?
- How often do I interact with my team members on topics beyond work and work projects?
- How positively would I regard my past interactions with my team members?
- How would I rate the quality and strength of my relationship with each of my team members (based on my general feeling and the results of these questions)?
Ask yourself each of these questions and use your insights as a guide for what steps you can take to improve the relationships you have with one (or all) of the members of your team.
Organizational Next Steps
The questions above are a great initial assessment tool for individual leaders. But if we want leaders in our organizations who are great relationship builders, we must support these skills, reward these skills, train people on these skills, and expect these behaviors as part of the leader’s role.
For holistic organizational change in this area, review your job descriptions, training, and other materials for this alignment. But you can start without all of that. Here are three things you can do now:
- Share this article with leaders and ask them to do a self-assessment.
- Review any employee surveys or exit interview survey data for clues about your leader’s current skill level as relationship builders.
- Connect relationship strength to current organizational challenges. When people see that stronger relationships help meet or overcome those challenges, they will naturally work on them.
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